How Do I Optimize My Website for Local Results?

A question often asked to us is “How do I SEO my website?” or “How can I be at the top of the search results?”. The short answer is that it’s complicated, a lot of work, and ever changing. Anyone who tells you flatly that they can take your website and give you top search results in a matter of days or weeks is at best lying and worst using tactics that will create more harm in the long run than any short term good.

With thousands if not millions of websites competing for the same keywords that you’re targeting how can you expect to get in the top search results?

Here’s the secret…Reduce the Competition

That’s right in order to see quicker results in SEO all you need to do is to reduce the amount of competitors. Imagine instead of competing against millions of websites, you’re only competing against a few thousand. Talk about leveling the playing field.

The way to reduce the competition is through very specific targeting. The more targeted your web pages, the less likely competition will overlap. There are two ways to increase your web page targeting, the first is content and the second is location.

Here’s a quick example: Let’s search for “best hot dog” you get 47 M results. That’s a lot of competition. Now let’s be more specific in content and search for “best kosher hot dog” now we get 398 K results. A lot less competition in those keywords and all we did was to target a more specific content. Let’s take this one step further and be more specific in location, we’ll search for “best kosher hot dog in Boston”. Now we’re only competing with only 190 K web pages. Now that’s something that’s workable.

Here is the take away: the more competition there is for your keywords, the longer, harder, and more expensive it is to have positive results with SEO. In the short term, focus on more targeted content and leveraging your location. Location based search is one of the most underutilized but most powerful techniques available to you.

To aid you in your search (pun definitely intended) for improved SEO and localized search check out the upcoming Webinar by Google this Wednesday February 18th at 2 PM EST. You can register here.